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Archive.org Deploys Macromedia Software Titles
Jon-Erik Hexum writes "Now at the internet archive, the new software section contains over 10,000 CD-ROM titles donated by Macromedia. In an interesting discussion, the Software Archive is struggling with deciding on the best method for preserving CD-ROM images for the long term."
No more pirating...er, i mean sampling with the intent do delete Flash 4 off of IRC...
Macromedia Software.... "Macrosoft" maybe?
Punch cards!
Slashdotted already? Goodness... that didn't last long!
Of course, when offering 10,000 CDs for download... a little extra bandwidth would probably be prudent.
they have these little, thin Plastic things called 'Compact Disks'...
Oh, wait...
Lagito ergo expectabo
The best way to preserve this media would be over a distributed network. People sign up to voulenteer space on their computers and then download only the media they want to archive. To retrieve the information, have a simple search client that will show you who has that information...Oh wait, that's just a P2P network.
Jason
ProfQuotes
Have sex with them. Then they'll never leave you alone!
They should burn the CD images to CDs.
I'm obviously out of the loop here....
What the heck are on those 10,000 cds (cd's?) anyways, and why is it so cool? Games? MP3s? Movies? Pr0n?
LongTail SSH Brute Force analysis tool is here!
"Hey! I have 10.000 CDs with software to share!"
I know 10 000 items is going to take you awhile to list, but if anyone's gotten through, just post some notables.
While I was indulging my data storage daydreams, I came across a discussion board thread which talks about the various issues surround storing digital media (pictures, in this case). It was pretty intersting reading. I hadn't thought about gold-plated CDs before, and that sounds like a great idea as long as the hardware to read them exists for the duration of the media's shelf life. Even NASA has been having trouble in that area.
At first blush, I'd say the way to save all the images would be some sort of distrubuted filesystem, a la Freenet. Package an ASCII metafile with the ROMs file format info along with the actual image file and that should do it. Some sort of centralized system of making sure that at least N copies exist in "the wild" and the data could be reasonably safe. I'm oversimplifying, of course, but it occurred to me that data integrity and file formats might not be the only barriers to long-term data storage. Governments aren't especially data-friendly 100% of the time, either. If you really want to save data for all posterity, you have to protect it from yourself as well.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
deciding on the best method for preserving CD-ROM images for the long term
.iso format. It's only physical media that will change, but with virtual drives, the iso format won't be unreadable!
Keep them in the standard
As the article stands, we have no idea if this story is a genuine big deal or something we can all ignore.
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Rip CDROM contents to bin or iso files. Store on hard drive in AmigaDOS format. Image hard drive using Drive Image. Split Image with rar and store rar files on series of Bernoulli drives. Backup Bernoulli drives to CDs.
- Rube G.
Here is the Google cache showing the breakdown of titles by category.
* 3D (35)
* Adv/Mkt Collateral (37)
* Audio (8)
* Business Ap (370)
* CBT (897)
* Collection (7)
* Commercial Design (45)
* Corporate (179)
* Demo (27)
* Editorial (15)
* Education (61)
* Educational (1355)
* Educational MM (178)
* Educational Multimedia (47)
* Edutainment (466)
* Entertainment (788)
* File Types (0)
* Fine Art (60)
* Government (1)
* Illustration (58)
* Interactive Business (482)
* Interactive Portfolio (11)
* Interactive Reference (185)
* Kidsware (238)
* Marketing Collateral (61)
* Non-commercial (93)
* Photo Manipulation (15)
* Promotion (24)
* Promotional (829)
* Reference (354)
* Self Promotion (9)
* Shocked Sites (81)
* Tool (2)
* Training (4)
* Type Design (21)
* Uncategorized (1361)
* Web Page/Site (59)
as PHP submits to the onslaught of slashbots.
sulli
RTFJ.
It doesn't appear that Macromedia is donating software, but rather a collection of Flash/Dreamweaver/Shockwave/Whatever projects that were 'Created with Macromedia'
Here's the google cache:
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
i tried loading their site in mozilla, and got a message back saying "redirection limit for this site exceeded".. wierd
Lower risk of slashdotting, as everything's 403 Forbidden.
sulli
RTFJ.
I hope he didn't mixed Macromedia and Macrovision once again ... coz a Macrovision CD would be rather useless IMHO
10,000 CD-ROMs <= 10,000*700MB = 7 TB
That isn't too much by today's standards, is it? Esp. considering you only need read-only access
Hey, it worked for the Egyptians for thousands of years. Just include some redundancy for errosion-correction, and...
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
Not a bad plan, though. Though I would go one step further and convert any data still readable into a format that includes a description of itself. This would mean that every video/audio/image should have it's own decoder attached. HTML files would have the HTML spec. This may seem like a huge waste of space, especially on smaller files, but it is worth it for the time saved reading files later on. Of course, you need something that can always read the description, but one standard program could function for all files in this format instead of countless files. Now, this doesn't help for executables (currently, anyway) but could improve data retention.
As storage availabilities and requirements rise, an encoder/decoder for many formats would become trivial, notable exceptions being made for massively integrated applications (*cough* Office *cough*)
After all, how do you think Star Trek managed to take 50,000 year-old data crystals and read the files stored on them, or interface with Borg computers? : )
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
Pick anything out there today and store them. Just pick something you expect will be easy to migrate, and have at least 3 backups in separate locations. None of today's digital storage media are very reliable long term. Also, plan on migrating before you have to worry about decay.
... was a tale from Philip K. Dick where music was encoded to animals or dna or something like that.
If you want to preserve something forever, encode it in a DNA form (I think that most of DNA code is inactive, so there are plenty of space), grow an live thing from it, and while descendents last, your software will survive.
A word of caution: don't try this with Microsoft software, the world have enough bugs already.
This is why Ive always loved and bought into the concept of VMWare (or similar) virtual machines. Software is pretty immortal, as the turing machine principle pretty much says any one turing machine can emulate another, so making sure the entire PC and OS can be emulated in software makes the software that runs within it immortal as well. The fact that you can run Linux and Windows entirely as self contained software as long as you can emulate the BIOS means they shouldb e around for a very long time, just keep porting the emulator to new hardware. I fear that Palladium and crap like it will bring this down though, as it starts to tie software to very specific hardware that yes, will crumble to worthless ashes quickly.
I'm Rick James with mod points biatch!
The obvious solution
They should burn the CD images to CDs.
The obvious problem with that:
The dies in writable CDs have a much shorter lifetime than the printed ones. Like three-ish years. So figure they have to make new copies ever two years, plus at least two spars of each, for redundancy. Call it 15K/year CD burnings just for this batch of 10,000 images.
Now an automated burning operation can do a bit more than 7 1/2 disks/hour single-shift. But then you have to have a carousell to handle 10,000 CDs (times several for redundancy), in order to automate the process.
So I don't think burning them to CDs is the solution.
Call it 3 CDs per gig. Or a bunch more, since most of 'em won't be full, so make that 10/gig. That's one terrabyte. Don't we have hard drives about that big now? Build a RAID, mirror it (offsite), replace disks as they die, and clone the mirror every few years to cover for catastrophic multi-disk failures and obsolescence of the RAID platforms and disks. Online all the time that way, too.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I havent seen the list of 10,000 titles as the site is /.'ed But, um, is it crap we really want to keep anyway? I mean, history and time has a way of filtering crap out that isnt worth much and preserving that which is. The worthy will stay, the unworth won't. It may seem noble to try to preserve EVERYTHING, but whats really the point? When was the last time you REALLY needed AutoDesk Animator Pro v1.0 for DOS? Im sure some jackass will try to prove me wrong with an anecdote of how his lucky copy of OS/2 2.1 on 5.25" floppies saved a business, but generally speaking, maybe they should work to preseve 50 of the titles, rather than 10,000. There will be some loss, but we'll get over it.
I'm Rick James with mod points biatch!
OCR also worked for RFC1149 (carrier pigeon internet protocol)...well...sort of
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
- Mutations - Happen all the time, look at albinos.
- Introns - Mutations are limited in practice because of introns, sections of DNA that don't encode proteins. IIRC, introns are a huge portion of all DNA, and mutations within them go completely unchecked. (Since they don't encode anything, mutations in introns don't express themselves, and thus don't effect the living creature positively or negatively.)
While it's a neat idea, I wouldn't but any more trust in DNA than my stack of C-64 disks, especially over several generations.-sk
OCR is getting better for recognizing language because it increasingly relies on linguistics (morphology, syntax and to a limited degree semantics). If you have something that isn't linguistic in nature (i.e. long strings of digits), it won't do a very good job for similar reasons as you find it easier to memorize Simpsons quotes than to memorize a 100 digit long string of random characters.
I am not a number! I am a man! And don't you
I'll be that they're really a shocked site at the moment! :^P
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
...microfiche it? You can get a lot of pictures of the CD-ROMs that way. ;-P
(I have a photograph...preserve your memories...)
Someone put a black hole in my pocket and now I'm broke.
hey all, I'm the volunteer at the Internet Archive who posted the 'call for comments' message on their CD-ROM forums, and I just wanted to clarify a couple of things: - the archive consists of CD-ROMs created by third parties with the 'Made For Macromedia' program, as another poster said. So it's all multimedia software created with Macromedia tools - basically, everything sent to Macromedia for approval between certain dates. Macromedia kindly donated this to the Internet Archive. - right now it's largely a physical archive, not a digital one - the content is still on the source CD-ROMs. - i'm a volunteer in the VERY early stages of looking at the Macromedia CD-ROM archive - in fact, my first day. i surface from the pile of software boxes to discover my call for archiving suggestions has slashdotted the site. hurrah! - there are currently only a couple of disc images downloadable from the site. they were put up last year, and I wouldn't recommend downloading them for now, since there's some compatibility and completeness issues with them. - most of the discs are either multimedia (like virtual guides to Jerusalem, educational guides) or what you might call ephemera (promotional CD-ROMs) The Internet Archive doesn't have any rights to post any of them online right now. - future plans would ideally include making some of these CDs available to the public for either remote access or download, providing the correct rights issues could be dealt with. With the shelf life of CDs somewhat of an unknown factor, creating digital archives of these discs and making sure they're preserved for future generations is important. Thanks, Simon.
hey all,
I'm the volunteer at the Internet Archive who posted the 'call for comments' message on their CD-ROM forums, and I just wanted to clarify a couple of things:
- the archive consists of CD-ROMs created by third parties with the 'Made For Macromedia' program, as another poster said. So it's all multimedia software created with Macromedia tools - basically, everything sent to Macromedia for approval between certain dates. Macromedia kindly donated this to the Internet Archive.
- right now it's largely a physical archive, not a digital one - the content is still on the source CD-ROMs.
- i'm a volunteer in the VERY early stages of looking at the Macromedia CD-ROM archive - in fact, my first day. i surface from the pile of software boxes to discover my call for archiving suggestions has slashdotted the site. hurrah!
- there are currently only a couple of disc images downloadable from the site. they were put up last year, and I wouldn't recommend downloading them for now, since there's some compatibility and completeness issues with them.
- most of the discs are either multimedia (like virtual guides to Jerusalem, educational guides) or what you might call ephemera (promotional CD-ROMs) The Internet Archive doesn't have any rights to post any of them online right now.
- future plans would ideally include making some of these CDs available to the public for either remote access or download, providing the correct rights issues could be dealt with. With the shelf life of CDs somewhat of an unknown factor, creating digital archives of these discs and making sure they're preserved for future generations is important.
Thanks,
Simon.
Oh great. First Google archives all my stupid posts from yesteryear, now all the stupid software I wrote will resurface and embarass me forever!
This would mean that every video/audio/image should have it's own decoder attached.
In what programming language would you write the decoder? You'd have to store the specification for that language as well.
HTML files would have the HTML spec.
I'd assume the HTML spec would be written in Unicode text in the English language. The Unicode specification is also written in the English language. So how would you store the specification of the English language itself?
Now, this doesn't help for executables (currently, anyway)
All you'd have to store for an executable is a description of the virtual machine it runs on, that is, an emulator. But then, you have to write the description in some language...
Will I retire or break 10K?
The sad part is, in 2050 proprietary s/w like Virtual PC or SoftPC still won't be public domain yet.
But if it's out of print, copying it may be fair use in the United States, as taking a work out of print may amount to an admission by the copyright owner that the work has so little value that any unauthorized use would not reduce its value.
If you know of any precedents otherwise, please respond.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I work with the Internet Archive, and I would like to correct some confusion. Short answer: people can not download the CDROM contents from the Internet Archive. There are 5 that are available because the Internet Archive got permission from the rights holder.
Our statement that Macromedia donated 10,000 CDROMs is incorrect. What Macromedia graciously did was to let us use their catalog of the CDROMs sent to them through the Made With Macromedia program. The also let our staff examine the CDROM's so that we can ensure the catalog is correct and facilitate contacting rightsholders to see if they would be interested in access to their materials.
We are very excited about providing access to any materials that people would like to be preserved. Please contact me, brewster@archive.org or more efficiently info@archive.org if you have any materials you would like to be added to the archive.
-brewster
I cruised thru a few of the listings... some obvious junk, but some looks like it might be useful as business examples, or for "company history" research, etc. At any rate, better to store too much data and have no clue what it's good for, than to pitch it and regret it later.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
1) there's basically nothing to download, and never will be
2) 99% of the 10k titles are utter junk anyway
Hey guys-- get off your millionaire butts and fix this broken resource.